Archive for 2010
Improv resources
In Bidness, PopCult, me, Me, ME! on March 3, 2010
For those who saw my talk at Ignite Dallas, here are the resource links I promised:
I took my Level 1 Improv class at Dallas Comedy House and am now in their Level 2 class. I wrote about my experience on Pegasus News. The story also includes a listing of other good improv programs around town. There is also a nascent community site: DFW Improv Forum.
For more on using improv in business, see The Applied Improvisation Network or Second City Communications. There was a recent article about the rise of improv in the workplace on CareerBuilder.
Info on London’s Yes And Club, which would be a cool idea in Dallas too.
Improv books:
The Second City book is better than Truth in Comedy, despite the latter’s pedigree. The Improv Handbook is next on my reading list.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Laughing Your Way to a Job (abcnews.go.com)
- Fifty Years of Second City (online.wsj.com)
- Second City Tops Off Anniversary Celebration With 24-Hours Of Sleep Deprivation (chicagoist.com)
- Men of the Second City 2010 calendars arrive (late we might add) (timeoutny.com)
For those who saw my talk at Ignite Dallas, here are the resource links I promised:
I took my Level 1 Improv class at Dallas Comedy House and am now in their Level 2 class. I wrote about my experience on Pegasus News. The story also includes a listing of other good improv programs around town. There is also a nascent community site: DFW Improv Forum.
For more on using improv in business, see The Applied Improvisation Network or Second City Communications. There was a recent article about the rise of improv in the workplace on CareerBuilder.
Info on London’s Yes And Club, which would be a cool idea in Dallas too.
Improv books:
The Second City book is better than Truth in Comedy, despite the latter’s pedigree. The Improv Handbook is next on my reading list.
Related articles by Zemanta
- Laughing Your Way to a Job (abcnews.go.com)
- Fifty Years of Second City (online.wsj.com)
- Second City Tops Off Anniversary Celebration With 24-Hours Of Sleep Deprivation (chicagoist.com)
- Men of the Second City 2010 calendars arrive (late we might add) (timeoutny.com)
The measurement mess
In Bidness, Media on January 24, 2010
It keeps getting smaller.
There’s a pissing match today among several InterWebs iconoclasts about Comscore’s traffic counting methods and business models. Actually, to be more accurate, it’s a bunch of bitch-slapping about unrelated issues, but web traffic is the jumping-off point.
You can read it for yourself — be sure to follow the comment thread too, in which all the principals rebut. (Or, as one commenter deems it, “three poodles fighting over a piece of raw meat”).
But for me, the whole thing is sad because it reminds me of another “scandal” almost six years ago now. Several newspaper chains had been caught overstating their circulation. There was all sorts of hand-wringing over it, but in the midst of the mea culpas, I read one simple line in a column by Ed Wasserman that changed my way of thinking and in large part led me to create The Daily You as a major feature of Pegasus News:
“Still, there is an absurdity to the whole scam. Counting copies is a dopey way to gauge impact. The explosion of information channels necessarily means erosion of audience share held by dominant media. There is still nothing that can rivet the attention of a community the way its daily paper does.”
Song of the moment: “Cast Away Dreams”
In Bidness, Music, me, Me, ME! on January 6, 2010
Lindsey Buckingham
While working my way through the New Year’s week, I watched a lot of concerts I’d recorded on TV, including Lindsey Buckingham’s HDNET show at Bass Hall a couple of years ago. There was one tune that hadn’t made an impression on me at the time — nor in repeated listenings to the album version. But when I heard Lindsey’s preamble this time it struck a chord.
Without the backstory, you might think the song a downer. But as Lindsey described it, it was about how when you have many dreams, they’re never all going to come to fruition. That’s something to deal with, but nothing to mourn — the burial of those dreams makes room for others. Sometimes you need to put “cast away dreams” to rest in a celebratory fashion, even by dancing upon them.
That’s something I’ve been thinking about lately, especially as I’m contributing to some efforts to provide support and inspiration to entrepreneurs on the rougher side of the adventure. Not every mission is a success — and that’s a good thing to be celebrated.
Let’s dance: Read the rest of this entry »
